[Marxism] Red Plenty

> Funny, I was just thinking a couple hours ago while walking
> dogs that I hadn't really read anything on this subject.
>> Are there other works people can recommend on any period of
> the USSR and how its economic system worked both internally
> and externally?
Alec Nove's 'Economics of Feasible Socialism' has criticism of the USSR
planning system, which means he offers a discussion of how it
functioned, and his 'The Soviet Economic System' is worth reading too.
Paul Cockshott & Allin Cottrell's 'Towards a New Socialism' (that is
available online), while not focusing on the USSR experience, has good
stuff on how economic planning with computers can actually work, instead
of just short assertions that "it can be done", and they deal with the
USSR experience to some extent as well. See also their 2008 foreword to
the Czech translation of the book and the section 'Historical failings
of socialism'.
http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/index.html
In Louis' writings on computers and socialism he criticises
Cockshott-Cottrell for utopian schemes, but I see the value of their
work in offering valuable ammunition for discussions with people who
think socialism is a good idea but doesn't work in practice.
Most of the marxist discussion on planned economy I've read is very
vague, and a lot of it seems to rely on communist abundance which is
thought to solve all problems in the end (thus e.g. Ernest Mandel in
'Marxist Economic Theory', which is a rather old book I admit).. Whereas
Alec Nove didn't believe it was possible to plan an economy (like the
USSR) that produces 12 million products, politically much more radical
David McNally in his 'Against the Market' doesn't believe that it's
possible to plan even hundreds of thousands of products, so he makes a
virtue out of necessity by saying that well it's doesn't really make
even sense to try to plan everything, and besides many prices could be
regulated. Unless you've got something like Cockshott-Cottrell's book
(which was written as a reply to Nove's 1983 book), it's hard to argue
against this credibly.
--
jjonas @ nic.fi